Old Search is deprecated in Sitecore 6.5

I’ve blogged about this before, now it’s official. If you have not seen this before, you can find the following in the Release Notes for 6.5:
The Sitecore.Data.Indexing namespace has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version of the CMS in favor of the more powerful and flexible Sitecore.Search classes and corresponding index definitions.

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Sitecore USA is looking for more brain power

Do you wake up in the morning and pop up Sitecore Rocks before getting your first cup of coffee? Can’t live without Sitecore? Here is your chance to join us in this continuing thrilling journey to success. We are looking for an experienced Solution Engineer.

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Sitecore Users Virtual Group

If you guys have not seen this initiative, check it out: http://www.sitecoreug.org

The Sitecore Users' Virtual Group is dedicated to supporting the Sitecore community wherever they exist across the globe. There are some great speakers lined up for our first sessions and all sessions are free of charge and conducted over the web. Here is the schedule.

The first presentation will take place next Wednesday, May 18, at 9:00 AM Pacific, Noon Eastern, or 5:00 PM UK time. John West, CTO of Sitecore North America, will discuss the state of Sitecore and the CMS marketplace. John has graciously agreed to answer your questions.

If you would like to attend, please register here.

Sitecore Support: Help us help you!

Greetings,
Quite an unusual post from me today. I spent last week working on a few support issues via the helpdesk, and must say, I enjoyed being so close to the customer and partners. I’ve been doing this for more than 5 years now and still remember the fun old days where we had email based support and a shared spreadsheet with the tickets. But we’ve come long ways, and product support is no exception. In April, actually, we hit a record of 859 support tickets filed by our customers and partners across the globe. That’s no walk in the park!

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Teach Sitecore to ignore a directory

This is a really quick post dedicated to the following scenario. You have either a standalone asp.net web app or legacy website. You want to host it underneath the web root with Sitecore instance configured and have Sitecore completely ignore the whole path (“/webapp”).

The issue you may be having is that during the request, Sitecore would try to “take over” and resolve a dynamic item “webapp” from the content tree which obviously does not exist. So you would get a “document not found” error*:

*Depending on the version of IIS, you may be experiencing different behavior.

There is a quick way to resolve this. Simply add the path to your standalone website to the “IgnoreUrlPrefixes” list:

   1: <!--  IGNORE URLS

   2:       Set IgnoreUrlPrefixes to a '|' separated list of url prefixes that should not be

   3:       regarded and processed as friendly urls (ie. forms etc.)

   4: -->

   5: <setting name="IgnoreUrlPrefixes" 
               value="/sitecore/default.aspx|/trace.axd|.....|/webapp" />

Now if your are not feeling nerdy today, stop reading and go fix it!

For the ones who continue reading, I can tell that the “ignore url magic” happens within the <httpRequestBegin /> pipeline which is invoked when the request goes through Sitecore.

So before the ItemResolver is hit, the “IgnoreList” processor would read the value of the “IgnoreUrlPrefixes” setting and figure out whether the pipeline needs to be aborted or not:

   1: <httpRequestBegin>

   2:    ...

   3:    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.IgnoreList, Sitecore.Kernel" />

   4:    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.SiteResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />

   5:    ...

   6:    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel" />

   7: </httpRequestBegin>

That’s all folks!